Man on a Unicycle

I've been busy as anything these past couple weeks. Art, writing, and general creation has gone on, but so has work, organization and exercise. It's left very little time for posts to be made on my blog, but it's left a satisfying feeling in my chest.

One such time-consuming event was this past Sunday evening. I attended my first friend's-birthday-party at, of all things, a Hawaiian-themed resaurant. The food was expensive, but I managed to get by on a delicious goat cheese and beet salad and some noodles. Not the best fare I've had, but everyone seemed satisfied with their choices.

In any case, as I explained the to the birthday girl, one of the pitfalls of having a cheap and artistically-inclined friend is that you get drawings for as gifts. Fortunately, she insisted that she loved hand-made gifts. Unfortunately, she had earlier revealed to me her love of men who rode unicycles. This resulted.

She's threatened to hang it in her house. I can only pray she was joking.

Swarm

For no reason at all, I decided on a change of scene this morning. Walked the half mile to my local coffee shop and worked on one of my recent projects there for a couple of hours. None of you will have heard of this, but it's called 'Arcana' and it's the delightful brainbaby of myself and a friend borne of countless head-together hours over the interwebs. Very proud of it. Anyway, I'm walking back in the early afternoon and I see a handful of bugs zooming around a little ways down the sidewalk. As I get closer, I wonder what these bugs must have been attracted by. Assuming they're flies of some kind, I look around for some stray garbage or--gods forbid--fresh roadkill. But as I'm glancing around, I catch a closer glimpse of one of them and realize that they have yellow stripes. In the same breath, I catch sight of a dark cloud just over the fence of the house I'm passing and realize with no small amount of terror--this is a swarm of wasps. I'm walking right by a cloud of angry wasps. Little thought goes into my wrapping my jacket quickly around myself and bolting, dusting my hair and clothing for any unwanted passengers. Fortunately, I was not stung. But I'm still wondering hours later what the hell pissed so many of them off--and whether or not the people in that house were planning on leaving at all that day.

Last night, I started a prompt pact with another artist friend of mine. The first prompt was 'a person caught in a strong wind'. Because of dinner obligations, I didn't get it all finished, but I'm rather happy with the progress I've made in a short time. Now I'm just debating continuing with it on paper or digitizing it--but I am enjoying the feel of a real pencil on paper for a change.

Oh, and the water came back on this morning. Yay!

Full Water Panic

So the fiance and I had a bit of an adventure today. This afternoon, I went to wash my hands and found that we had no running water. After I checked to make sure that it was not working anywhere in the studio or the main house, the fiance went to check next door to see if it was a neighborhood problem. Our neighbors in the main house were away on vacation, so I decided to investigate their mail. Sure enough--a notification that the water was being turned off because they'd failed to pay the water bill. I don't know if this was some fluke of the system or if they'd honestly forgotten to pay or what--but it meant that we had to take care of it or go without drinking until they got back from Ireland, where we can't call them about it because it's already midnight there.

So now we've got little more than an hour to get to the city where we can pay the bill to get our water back on. We shoot down there and take care of the issue relatively painlessly, but we're both stressed out about the whole thing. It has not been a fun afternoon. And we won't really know what happened until the neighbors responsible either call us back or return from their vacation. Hopefully the water will be back on tomorrow.

So to take up some space let by my lack of artistic activity, here's some of the avatar art I got done on Gaia before the muse left me.

Avi: The Featherless Angel

Avi: Countess Delsaber

Avi: Pure Forever

OC: Ally the Jellybunny

Avi: Blood_Red_Moon_Wolf

Avi: Mistress Deevine

OC: Kobraja












I've got a bunch more, but I figure this is a fine batch for now. Gotta save some filler for a rainy day. ;)

Happy 4th!

Happy Independence Day, folks! Despite the holiday, I'm still making the effort to post. Not that I've had much to distract. The majority of my barbecue guests had other plans, and the fireworks show malfunctioned, releasing  every piece of pyrotechnics they had into the sky at once. Made for a pretty thrilling seven seconds.

So, got in a little sketching this evening. Traditional, this time.

Still working out how to use 'levels' in photoshop. Maybe I'll find myself a tutorial.

Also note that these are vague imitations of a few favorites of mine on deviantart. I have an account there. I should update that thing.

Resurrection

So, despite the massive amount of NOTHING that's been going on here at the blog lately, I have been drawing. A little. Avatar art for Gaia has become less than stimulating, so while I have some of that to post, my more recent art has been geared towards some of my own characters--mostly from games I've been playing.

The plan is to give you a bit of a teaser to start, then deposit a massive post or two over the next couple of days.

I've been recently overcome by the desire to try out Dungeon Mastering. I have several new friends who want to give DnD a try, but are beginners and aren't quite sure where to start--on the other hand, another friend and I have never tried DMing, but think it could be lots of fun. So we're going to co-DM a beginner's campaign. As inspiration, the fiance suggested that I try out the game 'Legends of Grimrock'. In the first few minutes of the opening cutscene, my mind was swimming. Unfortunately, less with plans for a dungeon-crawl and more with a developing fantasy of the characters I'd assembled to tackle Grimrock. I started immediately recreating one of the opening scenes.

As you can see, it isn't finished yet, but the plan is to complete it at a later date. Tomorrow morning marks the first brainstorm behind my DM project! Wish me luck!